behind the scenes of our wedding - part 2

4. photographer
We were very picky about photographers and their styles. There also seems to be a glut of photographers available for these things, and it would be extremely time consuming to go through them. So we outsourced it to a photography friend of ours who were in desperate need for work at the time, told him to look through all the photographers in the LA/OC/SD area with availability on our date and give us a list of 5 or so that may fit within our budget guideline. (we actually asked him if he was interested in the gig and he turned it down since his focus is more on portraits, not events) Along with 1 other recommendation of an award winning photographer, we had a short list of 6.

Immediately, we decided to not consider 2 of the 6 due to various reasons, and another one recently relocated out of town and wasn't available to meet. To us, a photographer's personality is almost every bit as important as their work, so not able to meet face-to-face and talk to them is a big no-no. Of the 3 remaining, we met with all of them, spent about 1 hour talking to each couple, and talked it over among ourselves about how we felt about them. The first one we chose was not very up-front and clear about their cost, and everything was a la carte, and would've cost close to $10k on photography alone if we used them. The thing that made me rather unhappy was that they didn't present us with a very clear price structure, we had to ask if a particular item we wanted was included, if not, how much. We decided that if we can't communicate well with the photographer, we don't want to do business with them. The second one we chose had a surprise for us. After we signed the contract, she realized that she had double-booked, and since we are already fairly late in the wedding planning process, she offered us another couple to help her husband for our event; while she'll be at the other event with another photographer. We were initially hesistant about their editing style, but after meeting them, our mind was at ease.

As an apology, the photographers gave us a free bridal session photoshoot, which turned out to be rather fun and relaxing =)

On our wedding day, the husband had a "once every 2 year" back problem suddenly come up. Couple hours into our getting ready process, he somehow was able to drive 1.5 hours and made it to our event! Much kudos to him.

One month after our event, we are still waiting on the photos... but otherwise, so far, so good ^_^

5. officiant
Initially, we figure anyone would do, since we already tied the knot at city-hall a year prior to our wedding. But after hearing many people's advise, we decided that we might want to consider a professional. So we looked around and decided to meet up with 2 of them, one very traditional and one very open minded. We went with the latter, especially because she was an interesting character and we liked her world-view so-to-speak.

During our rehersal the day before, our wedding planner wanted to talk to her before rehersal started. Unfortunately, our planner (along with everyone from LA) had to suffer through horrific traffic and wasn't able to get there 'til late. In the mean time, our Officiant was getting bounced around by the Winery staff since nobody really know where to point her. Things got a littly testy, but fortunately didn't go nuclear ;-)

A couple of days before our wedding, we had edited our vowes with redlines, based on what she originally wrote for us. Unfortunately, our version of the vowes did not make it into the final event, which we weren't too happy about. Otherwise, I guess it was okay.

(okay, this is shorter than usual, but i'm done for now =P)

first gig

Very, very small. Technical details completed, now just the long documentation =) hopefully a little bit of follow-up work.

behind the scenes of our wedding - part 1

We are very grateful to have so many wonderful friends who shared such an important date with us. We hope that it was a unique and memorable event for not just the two of us, but everyone who was there. We haven't had the chance to thank everyone individually for being there, taking so many great photos and videos, we do have plans to mail out thank you cards, eventually ;-)

Many of you heard bits and pieces of details here and there, but I don't think anyone knows all the details that took place. Hopefully, this can be a good summary for the brides to be.

1. wedding planner - arguably one of the most important piece of the puzzle. some try to do away without it, but we didn't want to risk it considering it's a once-in-a-lifetime event and also the most expensive party we'll throw for many years to come. Our original planners were helpful in helping out on what we ask of them, but were also not on the same page with us. They seemed to have their own agenda and pushed for their own things, and didn't provide us with adquet transparency that we wanted. We decided that we'd rather spend more time worrying about wedding details than worrying about explaining them to our planners. So at the beginning of 2009, we decided to change to another friend who were more focused and in tune with our needs and preferences. The whole event wouldn't have gone so well if it wasn't for her help. We talked to one other planner in 2008, and felt she was too expensive and wasn't easily approachable.

2 . wedding venue - both of us liked the out-doors and my wife especially loved to be under the stars, so we set out to look for an outdoor venue. We didn't want to do beaches since that takes away the focus, and we didn't want to do golf-courses as I'm not a fan of golf by any stretch of the imagination, but we did want to be unique. First place we visited was Mt. Wilson Observatory and instantly fell in love with the site . Initially, they were very welcoming, gave us a tour of their 100 meter telescope and mentioned that it'd be the best place for the wedding. Suddenly, a week later, they ceased communication with us and refused to return our emails and calls , citing concerns about liquor, kids, and equipment. We were willing to not have alcohol, put the 2 kids on tight leash, and buy insrance for their equipment, but they wouldn't budge... Next we looked at the Wild Animal Park, which was nice but the experience felt like "buying a Porsche..." meaning every little thing was an added cost and the numbers added up pretty fast . For that cost, they weren't even willing to let us pet their big cats, which was one of the foremost attractive feature of the site. We decided to continue our search and keep it as a back-up choice and checked out a few other places but none where worth writing home about, so we looked up the wineries. A year ago, when we were still bouncing around the idea of having a wedding, we were wine tasting at Santa Barbara, and at that time, we fell in love with Rideau Vinyards for their wine and the location. Unfortunately, San Yenez Valley was just too far for everyone , especially the dozens of people from San Diego. The wife looked up all the wineries in Temecula (22 or so), came up with a list of 10 that looked reasonable, of which 5 were preferred and 5 were backup choices. We looked at all 5 locations, talked to their on-site coordinator, compared what they had to offer, their cost, the dates available, and many other factors, and ultimately decided to go with Wilson Creek. They were one of like 2 places that can do all out-doors, and one of 2 places that had 5/24 available. (Usually, Sunday wedding has lower minimum guest count requirements and lower per-person cost, and we set our sights on that day for various reasons) To our pleasure, they are also one of the most accomondating and easiest venues to work with, according to our wedding planner.

3. dress - Since my wife didn't get to attend her senior prom nor any college dance and such, we decided to invest in a dress for keepsake to help make it the whole event more memorable. We looked up various places to purchase the wedding gown, half-dozen or more brands from the mid-$1k to the excessively over-priced vera-wang that runs for over-$10k. I wanted mermaid, she wanted puffy; we wanted more sexy, but for consideration of the parents we had to be somewhat conservative. After trying on about 2 dozen or so dresses at half-dozen stores the one both of us liked was around $8k, so we decided to see if we can have a custom made dress for cheaper instead. We knew what we wanted by then, and the designer Nazzy at I Do in Newport Beach instantly understood us and made many contributions of her own. We negotiated the cost to $4k and paid half of it on the spot and two weeks later, we received a pencil sketch of it over email. It took her 2-3 months to get the materials, all silk and lace from France. Starting in Janurary, we drove to newport beach every other weekend for dress fitting and design. It was completed by end of March, just in time for bridal session in April.

3.1 the second dress - we wanted the bride to be outstanding in color so we settled on red, and since the wedding gown was mostly mermaid style we wanted the second dress to be puffy/princess like. Initially, we thought about having 3 dresses, but decided that it was too much time spent changing and settled on 2. The wife took pictures of 2 dresses she liked, sent it to her mom in hk along with some measurements, and a few weeks later we received a dress that's not as red as we asked for and not as small as it should be. Apparently, the tailor decided to make the changes without consulting us. One of many reasons why outsourcing doesn't work. We had to have it altered here, for a hefty sum, and all together came out to about $1k.

-- rest to be filled in later...

4. photographers

5. officiant

6. DJ

7. makeup

8. flowers

9. cake

10. dance instructor

11. designs (center piece, table arrangements, seating arrangement, cake, wedding favor, placecards, menu, schedule, song sheet, canvas print, dance steps, budgeting, etc, etc)

more new random ideas...

Came up with one random thought this morning and one idea last night. These 2 should be useful enough and simple enough to implement by us =)
6) parking locator
There are plenty of times I, and i'm sure many others, had to walk around and around to look for our car in a giant parking lot. Seems like you should be able to get an accurate enough 3-D accelerometer, connect that to a simple embedded CPU, and make a small parking-locator that fits on any keychain. Only needs 1 button - "set location" when you park, and a display that points out where is your car with relation to where you are currently at. Only thing necessary is an accelerometer that's dead-accurate... time to do some research on this ;-)

Only hick-up would be those parking structures with slopped ramps that could make it confusing for the end users... but it's already a lot better than completely forgotten which floor you parked at, and end up going through 3 or 4 floors of parking structure looking for the car... I for one, have done that a few times at least -_-

On second thought - if the hardware in the iphone is "good enough," then it can be an iphone app first ;-) if not, then we'll have to use dedicated 3d-accelerometers...

prototype parts cost - shouldn't be more than $2-300
ideal production cost - <$25

7) fridge catalog
These days, we try to cook, but depending on phase of the moon, level of stress, length of work, or any other unknown reason, we often end up buying takeout. That's fine except once in a while, when we decide to go back to cooking ways, we find groceries from 2 weeks ago that are have already went bad, or on the verge of going bad. There are plenty of other instances where we throw something in the depth of the fridge, it gets over-shadowed by bigger items outside, and we forget about it until one day, we find little green things in a bag towards the back -_-' So, I figured we can easily setup a simple catalog of food in the fridge!

This should be a magnetic device that's removeable, so you can take it with you to grocery stores, so you don't have to make grocery shopping lists. Should have a color touch-screens with big icons, with several options:

inventory display (default, phase 1) - what kind of stuff is in the fridge, and how much of it. Also, how long it's been sitting there, and how much longer it can stay before it goes bad.

input options (phase 1) -
top level display - "freezer" vs. "4c"
second level display - "fruits" vs. "veggie" vs. "drinks" vs. "meat" vs. whatever...
third level display - detailed type, ie watermelon, strawberry, chicken, left-over food, etc. This is the only "customizeable" level, either sort by alphabet, by personal preference, or however the person likes it...
fourth level - amount of food of that type, either in lb, count, or "portion" if people wants to separately portion their food like we do before tossing things into the freezer.

grocery shopping option, simple (phase 1) -
input via touch-screen in an iphone-like fashion, of list of things to buy. easily cross-off/inventoried as you put things in cart. (would be neat if the device can double as hand-held balance to weigh various items =P)

recipe option (phase 2) -
Based on what's in the fridge, you can either have the device recommend some recipe. Also, based on what's in danger of going bad, the device can maximize the items in the fridge via various recipes. This could have an extensive amount of ethnetic recipes, either all contained in the device, or downloadable over computer. (self contained, with a "random" option would be kinda neat)

This options should also accompany an input option for various spices and other items available in the kitchen.

Additionally, various nutritional values and similar information can be stored on the device, for the health-nut who wants to be on some special kind of diet plan or whatever...

grocery shopping option, complex (phase 3) -
keep track of what's usually purchased and inventoried in the fridge, combined with cooking frequency and recipe used, recommend groceries to buy and how much. This can be linked to the "coupon/ad database" idea and can be designed to optimise for cost, for organic, or whatever. the device can have a simple coupon sorting capability too... *shrugs*

In terms of power, rechargeable battery would be nice, via USB would be ideal ;-) While this could be made into an iPhone app as well, I don't really think that the iPhone screen is big enough. Also, it's a "fridge device" that's best served when it's on the fridge, in the kitchen, dedicated and always-on, and I'm envisioning it to be similar in size to say, Kindle... (but that doesn't have a touch screen...) If Apple eventually releases the much-rumored bigger-touch or their web-pc or whatever it is, it might be the ideal platform to prototype and develop an application for.

prototype parts cost - shouldn't be more than $500-1,000
ideal production cost - <$300 (needs to be cheaper than a "tablet PC")

ideas, part 2

2. coupons
When my family first came to the states in '92, a family of 3 had to live on a $25k/yr budget. Back then, we did everything to stretch our budget, from coupon cutting to driving to mexican shopping mall at downtown SD for groceries. Of course back then, gas was around $1.25/ga, so it wasn't as painful to make that drive.

As time progressed and as our income went up, the art of coupon cutting slowly went away. These days, it's just a lot more time saving and a lot more convenient to go to Costco for none-grocery item, and 99-ranch or korean market for everything else. As for electronics, there are always online stores that are far cheaper than anything Best Buy or Fry's offer even when it's on sale (amazon, ebay, woot, whatever). And of course there are websites like slickdeals.net to help find good deals easier.

Nevertheless, as the economy is getting worse and everyone's belt is getting tighter, there isn't yet a good way to maximize daily expenses like groceries. I remember there used to be a time when you can ring up like 25 items for $75, apply coupon and sometime double-coupon, and end up paying $10 for them. Yes, those days still exist now, as highlighted by a recent NPR segment. Unfortunately, the art of going through weekly grocery ads and coupons, is mostly a lost art for most Americans, as is the newspaper business and along with it, the Sunday Coupons...

So, I figured, while it's not the world's easiest thing to do, it wouldn't be the most difficult either, to match ads with coupons in order to maximize every dollar you earn. Start with digital or a scanned version of local weekly ads that comes in the mail every tue/wed, along with advertisements inside the newspaper, plus coupons found on Sunday's paper or through the mail (let's face it, who religiously go through "penny saver" these days? -_-') and match them.

The hard part is proper recognition of ads and coupons, as they are often arranged in ways that are not the easiest to partition, OCR, and categorize. Once that part is taken care of, next is properly addressing expiration date of coupons. Next, having a mock shopping-cart could be useful, where the user can estimate how much things cost for them to only go to local ralphs or vons, vs. going to multiple places. Email alerts on prices would be helpful too, like say if someone wants to wait around for toothpaste to become free after coupon... Lastly, having a list of none-on-sale items at the local grocery store will complete the online grocery shopping experience. After-all, $4/lb of orange "on sale" at Ralphs is still far more expensive than $1/lb of similar stuff at 99-ranch. (Green onions are like $.40 at Food4Less, $.33 at 99-ranch, $.25 at local Korean market, lol)

This of course, would provide tremendous price-pressure on local grocery stores. But then again, Super-Walmart already did that for 80% of the country. Only in areas where it's banned by law (*ahm*city of san diego*ahm*) are grocery stores still able to charge so much. Granted they have better pay and benefits than a Walmart, but sometimes, their prices are just ridiculous... If Trader Joes can provide organic products for comparable if not cheaper prices than local grocery stores, while providing good wages and benefits, Vons and Ralphs can reduce their prices by becoming more operationally efficient!

3. cart return
Grocery carts are expensive (~$200 each), require some poor joe to collect and drag it back to the store, and gets left everywhere, especially near tree-planting areas and such. There's also the issue of "dude, where's my car?" where people forget where they park at big parking lots like those in front of Costco. So, it would be far easier if there's a dedicated cart to each parking spot, on a rail-track system, that starts and ends at the entrance/exit of the stores. When someone parks, their cart will follow them to the door of the store. When they exit, their cart will lead them back to their car.

Conceptually simple, logistically not the simplest thing to do. For starters, there's the cart-congestion issue... which I guess we can address by having a "driving lane" and a "parking lane" for carts. 4 lanes for carts is enough to park a car, which means even less parking spots... that's not ideal... So perhaps a cart-distribution location, like the current setup where 25-50 carts fit in 1 parking spot would be more preferred. Once the person park their car, the parking spot has a number in front and a sensor below. A cart will light up with the associated parking spot number and make its way to the store. On the way out, it finds its way to the back of the car where the trunk is located, then return to the nearest distribution location.

Then there's the liability issue... what if someone's walking along the track and get hit by a cart, who'll be responsible? I guess there has to be some kind of proximity sensor and warning/alarm system... or you just have to build the whole thing above/below ground to avoid people and reduce space usage all-together. Of course this makes the already expensive idea even more expensive, and any failures much more difficult to correct... Oh the tradeoffs -_-

background and outlook

Oh, before getting too far ahead with ideas, here are a bit of background for those who eventually wonder here not from facebook or friends on fb I haven't talked to lately =P

I got my BSEE from Caltech in '03, took some time off, found a job in Boeing Satellite in '04, met my wife in '07, got married in '08, found a new job in SD in '08 to move closer to my wife's job ^_^ Also, I got my MSCS from USC in '08, and currently pursuing a System Engineering certificate for what it's worth.

While I enjoy the mental stimulation from academic work, I'm more of a hands-on, break things and figure out how to fix it kind of person. I entered college knowing that I didn't want to suffer the rigor of applied physics and didn't want to become a full code-money. As I finished my BS, I came to the realization that software is a tremendous enabling technology that provides incredible amount of possibilities you can only dream of achieving in hardware... or rather, to do it in hardware will require billions of dollars, whereas software maybe a few hundred hours. That's why I decided to get a masters in CS, and took all the classes for pure personal interest rather than doing something for the sake of resume padding. (There was 1 class I hated, but 1 out of 9 isn't bad ;-))

My wife got her BSCE with a minor in Robotics from CMU in '05 and MSCE in '06, and constantly thinking about a PhD in robotics.

Between the two of us, I'm more of a hardware and firmware person, writing C-code as necessary and get things to work in a quick-and-dirty way. She's more of software person, doing OOP in java and the likes. Besides the need of a good mechanical engineer, we have most of our basis pretty well covered =)

When I left Boeing, general consensus from my co-workers were that they weren't surprised I left, but they were surprised that I left for another (here unnamed) aerospace company. And frankly, they are right. Even prior to leaving Boeing, my wife and I are getting various requests to help with various engineering aspects from various sources. While at Boeing, even though work's slow at times, I get to play with things closer to my major, ie hardware design, trouble-shooting, and the likes. These days, I sit in an open area behind thick, locked doors, working on some program as a sub-system analyst, far away from directly dealing with hardware or software. Okay, it's not as bad as it sounds... in a twisted way, aerospace is at the "cutting edge" of some aspect of software... specifically, Real Time Operating System with time and space partitioning is something that'll converge with commercial OS in the next few decades; software auto-coder starting with UML down to things like MATRIXx and Rational Rose, which maybe will replace code monkeys 30-50 years from now; Control laws, fancy ground-segment tools, and other works that are surprisingly up-to-date with industrial developments.

Meanwhile, I come up with various random ideas, but don't have the time to really explore them in depth. We still have engineering requests from others that we'll be working on after our "make-up wedding" in May, and looking to start a generic "engineering solutions" company, to help realize other people's ideas. Of course there are our own ideas that will be in various stage of development, and if we get enough work, we'll look to start a Limited Liability Partnership, bringing in new talents and old friends into the mix. Frankly, I'd rather have partners than employees, but they can start as employees and build their own client base. Over time, I'd like to encourage people to be on their own if possible, to provide healthy competition or just make operations more efficient. If enough decides to go off on their own, maybe we'll create a little technology niche in so-cal ;-)

I still remember at Boeing So-Cal Leadership Conference in 2008, I asked about the company's stance on spin-offs, and the response was along the lines of "we don't like spin-offs because we are afraid of talents fleeing"... HELLO!!! if they are truly talented, all that corporate bureaucracy won't be of interest anyway! If one day, I start to think like that, that means my organization is one on the decline, and it'll be time to re-think about my business model. So, hopefully, over time, I'll have some success with various engineering project to be able to bring and encourage more talents to follow our footsteps, and maybe even one day, supersede slow and cumbersome companies like Boeing Satellite (if I ever decide to venture in that direction, which I doubt).

So, all you MechEs, EEs, CEs, CSs, even BiEs (my dad owns a biotech company, so if you are a BiE, you are more than welcome to contribute... sorry, no ChemEs for now ;-) ), if you would like to contribute time, money, ideas, or want to hire us, we are open to it =P Hopefully, as this blog develops over time, it'll also help sell me and my wife's abilities and help generate clients. Remember, your ideas will remain fully confidential unless I get your permission to publish =)

previous ideas

To-date, there's been a few ideas I've had that might be worth something... but can be rather difficult to implement. Hey, if it's easy, someone would've done it already ;-)

0. scuba reservation -
An idea that me and a buddy kicked around. we wanted to form a boat reservation system for scuba diving similar to Reserve America for camping-sites. We got as far as talking to a few boats, but it's one of those things that's difficult to build momentum due to organizations like Sport Chalet signing long term contracts and boats not want to miss out on locked-in revenue. I'm not giving up on this yet, but at least for now, not actively pursuing it either.

1. boxes -
Last time I moved, we hired a moving company. We ended up with literally 50-75 cardboard boxes. We gave most of the good ones to friends who needed them for moving, gave some to random people who were moving, and tossed plenty of them away. That got me thinking - what if we make a fully re-useable box?

At first, I was thinking about the market... when I went to the container-store, it's pretty obvious that if done right, there'll be sufficient market for these things... A cardboard box that has a fancy hanger attached to the top goes for something like $20... and we ended up using like 10 of those -_-' Lucky for us, the moving estimator underestimated our cost, so we paid a fraction of retail price for the boxes we got

Conceptually, it's rather simple. It has to be FULLY modular, ie each panel has to be identical to reduce production cost. You can have a few sizes for different size items, but ideally, you can say put together 2 smaller squares to make a rectangle. Ultimately, this box needs to be water-proof (but not flood proof), somewhat fire-proof, and can hold say 25lb (easy enough for 1 person to carry).

Instead of moving companies sell these boxes, they can just "rent them" to the people who are moving. When they finished unpacking, they can drop them off at the local uhaul or fedex office, and get their deposit back. For those who self-move, they can rent them from local fedex too.

Initially, cost of renting these boxes can be on par with buying paper ones. At least it'll appeal to the "environmentally conscious" consumers. As production and distribution becomes more mature, cost of production will inevitably go down.

Implementation wise, this is the simplest. Logistically, it is rather difficult. Operational Research, if you are into that kind of thing, must be optimized. Perhaps someday, Walmart will consider it =P

2. coupon

3. shopping-cart return

4. highway meet ATM (to come)

5. shower (to come)

purpose

The other day, my wife said to me - "I want a sumomo for our 10th anniversary and a babblefish for our 50th anniversary... if you can't make those things, i'll divorce you." My reaction was simply o_O

She encouraged me to maybe start a blog and get some feedback from readers, so here i am =)

Anyway, the concept of babblefish is rather simple - a universal translator to eliminate all chance of miscommunication and misunderstanding... easier said than done... only way for that to work, given what I know of today, is to have some kind of mapping of neurons to electronics... perhaps a quantum computer can achieve this kind of computational capability in 40 years? leaving me 10 years to do some design? lol

As for "Sumomo," it's a toy from Chobits, a Clamp anime/comic. The concept is a personal communicator that dances and you can have a "conversation" with. To the first degree, it's a super-cute cell-phone with voice commands and then some. I have some thoughts on this one, will leave that for a later post.

Just to get a few things straightened out -

0. (hey, any "real" engineer will start with 0, lol) This blog will consist of engineering ideas that came out of my and my wife's head. If someone else wants to discuss their idea with us, it will be Confidential unless they tell me I can publish it. Chances are, there will only be a few things I will end up developing due to time and funding limitations. As far as knowledge limitations, I can always try to "pull a few strings" and get some help from Caltech or CMU alumnis if it's sufficiently interesting, and when it comes to engineering, that's plenty of support =P

1. I've decided that instead of being all secretive and protect all my ideas as if they are worth something, I am willing to let all my ideas out in the wild. By posting it on a public forum like this makes the idea unpatentable, so if someone else steals it, at least they can't sue me for patent infringement.

2. Reason I've decided on that is hopefully, i'm not a "one-trick pony." If I come up with ideas worth stealing and someone else with more time, more equipment, more money can implement it faster, at least I know I've made some small contribution to this world, for better or worse =P

3. Hopefully, if one day I get famous (haha... riiiight), it'll serve as an encouragement for others to be more interested in engineering, and to "do the right thing" instead of filing frivolous patents and suing everyone for loyalty (*ahm*qualcomm*ahm* lol)

4. All this openness is good 'n all, but if one day, I come up with some "revolutionary idea that can change the world" that's akin to the magnitude of say electricity or semiconductor, I WILL patent it -_-' lol but we all know those things come once every 100 years or so...

Lastly, due to the fact that I hold a full-time job, progress will be slow... don't expect me to implement something in a week... it might be a month before some idea starts to move into implementation -_-' Of course I do have a time constraint, so hopefully, I won't leave it there for too long =P

That's all for now =) Show some support and holla if you like it ;-)